Visio Reviews

My primary use case is for designing the architecture diagram and the network diagram. 

The most valuable feature is how easy it is to use. 

Visio could be improved by adding more features. If you look at draw.io, they have more features. Also, if you want to design something for the cloud, Microsoft Azure still isn't enabled, so you need to install the plugin. This prototype is easily available, though. 

I have been using this solution for almost ten years. 

The stability is quite good. There is not much maintenance really required. If it's on your desktop and something goes wrong, it is usually available to repair again. You don't need anyone else to maintain it. 

I previously used the Sparx System Enterprise Architect, but my experience with it was limited. It was discontinued because they stopped the licensing. 

The installation was straightforward. It takes about five to ten minutes and you can do it yourself. 

I implemented myself. 

I pay for the license and it is very expensive. If you're only going to use this tool from time to time, you can save money by just using the available online tools. But if you plan on using it heavily, then it's worth it to invest. 

I would rate this product an eight out of ten. I recommend this product to others because it's a useful tool for designers and architects. 

Company-wide, it is used a lot for flow charts. From an IT perspective, we use it quite a bit for network diagrams and documentation. The Human Resources team uses it for organizational charts.

In terms of deployment, we have a kind of mixed deployment. I tend to use an on-prem version that is loaded directly on my machine. We are all Office 365, so a bulk of our users use it as a cloud-based downloadable solution, which is a part of their Office 365 implementation.

It helps us to secure business and C-suite leadership approval on projects. For lack of a better term, it dumbs down technical solutions so that everybody can understand them. It provides a nice middle ground. We have a lot of really talented engineers on staff, but they tend to get lost in the technical minutia, and the business gets bored with that. 

A lot of built-in templates are really phenomenal. The templates assist in translating very complex design elements into understandable diagrams that non-technical folks can grasp.

Some of the improvements that have been made in Visio have not been beneficial, at least to me, personally. Too many things have been added to it, and it makes it kind of clunky sometimes. There is an overwhelming desire or competition to continue to improve it when the product is and has been pretty good, and some of what is done tends to clutter it. In some cases, the updates make it more difficult to use. It is already pretty feature-heavy and continuing to add stuff is not productive from my perspective. 

I have been using this solution for 10 to 15 years.

It is very stable.

I don't have any input on that. In terms of the number of users, we probably have a couple of hundreds of users of Visio. They are from the IT and the infrastructure side. We have Applications users and Human Resources users. We have a manufacturing organization, so we have program managers who manage various customer products, and they use it as well.

It is used fairly extensively throughout the organization. Our usage is okay for now, but we're always one acquisition away from that going out the window.

I've never used technical support for Visio.

It has always been Visio. Prior to using Visio, it probably was Paint or whatever program was available at the time.

It is straightforward. It takes very little time to deploy.

It is done in-house. In terms of maintenance, because we're loading it from the cloud, if there's an update, that's taken care of with the regular Office updates. So, pretty much everything is on the front end, that is, getting it from a business standpoint, getting the approval for the license and the cost associated with the license, and getting it installed. Once it is in, it is usually off to the races.

We have definitely seen a return on investment.

We're in a Visio plan that is like $15 a month per user. At the moment, it is just the standard licensing fees that I'm aware of.

Be aware that it is easy to get lost in all the different things to do with it.

I would rate Visio a nine out of ten.

I am working as a business analyst and I used Visio for process mapping.

I like Visio because you basically do anything you want.

The templates are useful, for example, because we can implement a project using the BPMN template. It's very good that you have got that option.

This is a very straightforward product and I don't think that anything needs to be simplified.

It integrates with other products reasonably well.

I would like to see the project planning element improved, although it won't happen because Microsoft deliberately made it worse. They did not like the idea that you could actually plan a project with it, so they greatly diminished the capability because it was competing with Microsoft Project.

Back in the days before Microsoft got their hands on it, it was quite a capable system for managing small projects. If you were doing something that only had half a dozen people and runs for up to a year or something, Visio was perfectly adequate for doing all of the project planning. Whereas, from what I have seen of it now, you could not project plan making a cup of tea with it. They have completely emasculated the project planning capability.

I have been using Visio since it first came out, perhaps 35 years ago.

Stability-wise, it is absolutely fine. I have had no problems with it at all.

We have had no problems with scalability.

I have never needed to contact technical support. I've never had a problem.

For anything other than project planning, Visio seems to be absolutely fine and I recommend it. This is an excellent product. As it can do everything that I want it to do, I have not really considered any room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I analyze and model processes for optimization. We are customers of Visio and I'm a founder of the company, working as a process consultant.

It's a very agile product because I can map and model a process extremely quickly. It's user friendly and there are a lot of templates I can use that are really useful. I like very much that I can publish the different models I've created with my clients and they can view the entire process, it's really useful. It provides a lot of advantages because you can see the inefficiencies visually, and it's really easy to analyze and to detect different inefficiencies in order to improve the process.

I'd like to be able to extract different data from different relations between the objects I create and I'd like the ability to analyze the different relations between activities, positions and roles. Visio can't give me this functionality. I would also like to be able to introduce more information in each object. For example, to include some codes or name or description of the activity, to be able to introduce more data in the object. To have this information in the objects would be great. 

I've been using this solution for six months.

This is a stable solution. 

From my clients' perspective, it's really scalable. It can be used in any type of company. I think it's really useful for any person that is working for a company with a wide range of processes. I'm the only person in my company who uses it and I'll continue to do so because it's so user friendly. 

I used Aris for a short period of time several years ago. It was a good experience but a more expensive solution. I'm evaluating it again and depending on the conditions the company offers, I might start using it again. I can keep using Visio even if I start using Aris as well.

The initial setup is very easy. With 365 it's very fast. It's good. I think I was able to deploy in 30 minutes. I did it myself although I was in contact with the chat bot at the beginning to ask some questions.

I pay a monthly fee to Visio.

I would recommend the product and I think it's very useful for any person that works in a company where you need to visualize the process you work in and to analyze ways of improving. 

I would rate this solution more highly if it was easier to extract data but for now I rate Visio an eight out of 10. 

We primarily use Visio as a flow chart software solution.

The application makes plotting and flowcharting very easy and very user-friendly. It is intuitive and doesn't take any time to make a complete and sophisticated flow chat from end to end. We are considering shifting completely from iGraphics to Visio Pro for office 365. I'm good in Visio, but I'm not an expert in iGraphics, so more comparison is necessary to define which solution is better.

The main feature of Visio and Autodesk that makes it attractive is that using Visio for just a week or two, people found that it's easier and more user-friendly in terms of flowcharting. The shapes library is much easier, the integration between Visio and other Microsoft Office tools is instantaneous. 

The concerns were that Visio did not have all the necessary features. In iGraphics, for example, you may add a command in the flow charts and add a note for a specific activity. When exporting it into a PDF, these notes get mentioned with the chart number so it's very easy to refer back to each note. It is a bit more efficient for reference without any extra effort. This was one of the features that they were missing in Visio.

iGraphics has a compulsory function which creates a complete reference and a complete library of all the processes related to my enterprise, my organization, in certain shapes or hierarchies. It's very handy and very easy to reference.

This is not as straightforward in Visio. Visio can compensate for this and have these processes in the same hierarchy. It is just related to collaboration. I can check the changes in the processes and models using the tracking feature.

There are not a lot of things that need to be improved in Visio from the user's perspective, but maybe some functions are missing. For example, migrating flow charts from iGraphics should be easier. When checking on some forums, some users mention data converters — so that may be a possibility. But it is not an official Microsoft solution for migrating the igx or the iGraphics flow charts to a Visio flow chart. It's a drawback, and it's a very big drawback. If we are not going to use Visio, the lack of integration would be for this reason. It's a show stopper for us right now.

The function that isn't integrated in Visio is having a share point. If I'm going share with somebody who's more knowledgeable about a particular aspect of a workflow, they have to know how to use the share point. This is a drawback. iGraphics doesn't need that. It's much easier.

More centralized integration would be desirable, but I believe that's not the direction Microsoft is taking with the product. If everybody moved to a cloud-based environment, a more centralized solution that catered to users to cut extra processes and functions, Visio would be perfect. 

In short, integration and easier migration would be beneficial.

It's very stable and has been since we implemented it.

It's easy to scale. We have not implemented permissions so that may be more complicated. 

We didn't have to use it yet. We were considering a different support contact in order to find the solution to migration.

It's easy to set up. It's all straightforward, like any Microsoft installation.

I'm not involved in the financial decisions, so I can't calculate the actual value in return on investment. However, it saves time in training.

Pricing is related to the number of Microsoft licenses being served.

iGraphics was the solution which was in place, but the support contact with iGraphics ended. Because we needed to have a new contact and iGraphics is very expensive, we started to check other solutions for the flow charts. Many were also expensive. But Visio was the most cost-effective.

I rate Visio as an eight out of ten on a very conservative scale. It is an 8 for ease of use, efficiency, and flexibility. It's not 9 of 10 because it lacks integration functions.

If you have a team that is not sophisticated or oriented to flowcharts, or if you don't have a lot of time to train these people, I guess Visio comes in handy as a very easy solution. When I started to train people on Visio, it didn't take more than two or three days. 

Even people who use iGraphics for years don't know all the features or know that they exist. 

We use the product for business modeling and workflow design.

The product only functions well professionally, with adding additional software for configuration.

We have been Visio for more than 20 years.

The product is stable.

The product is only scalable if utilized with additional software.

The initial setup is straightforward. However, it only fits a professional approach if you add additional software. It can be deployed on-premises and on the cloud.

I rate Visio a seven out of ten. I recommend it for beginners. However, I advise others to use it along with additional software.

I use Visio to go to meetings on Zoom.

I use Visio all the time.

Visio is stable.

Visio is scalable.

Installing Visio is straightforward.

The price could be lower because it is too expensive in South America when paying in dollars or euros.

We use Visio for architecture modeling. We also use it to facilitate communication with other people.

The feature I like most about Visio is that it acts as a facilitator of communication, as it displays information that's easier to understand.

The only area for improvement we see in Visio is its integration. It could be improved, but in terms of features, we are really satisfied with the standard features of this solution.

An additional feature I'd like to see in Visio in the future is database integration. It would be good if it could be integrated with a database or data system to better manage the data, which would also help it communicate better with other applications.

I've been using Visio for seven years now.

We didn't experience any performance issues with Visio. It's a stable solution.

The setup and implementation of Visio went smoothly.

The popularity of a product is an indicator of its price. Because of the popularity of Visio, its price is on the higher side.

I don't have an intensive experience with Visio on architecture.

Within our organization, there are more than 20 users of this solution.

We are satisfied with Visio, but we are not intensive users of it. We have not been able to try out all of its features.

We didn't have a chance to contact technical support because we have not experienced any performance issues from this solution.

My advice to people who would like to try Visio is that it may not be the best solution in the market for architecture modeling, or for other modeling purposes, but it is effective in facilitating communication with others.

With one being the worst and ten being the best, I'm rating Visio a seven.